


Leaning on My Shovel in This Graveyard of Dreams

by Septembers_coda



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Aging, Angst, Brooding, Brotherly Angst, Depressed Sam, Depression, Despair, Gen, Ghosts, Grief/Mourning, Hurt No Comfort, Hurt Sam Winchester, Sad Ending, Salt And Burn
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-22
Updated: 2015-10-22
Packaged: 2018-04-27 14:51:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 891
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5052925
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Septembers_coda/pseuds/Septembers_coda
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sam does his job and reflects on a decade of hunting, in both his past and his future.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Leaning on My Shovel in This Graveyard of Dreams

**Author's Note:**

> The fic was inspired by this song, from which the title comes:   
> **[_Graveyard_ by The Devil Makes Three.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rsFtb_A4LnE) **

Sam paused to wipe sweat from his brow as he broke through the coffin lid, jamming the shovel into some loose grave dirt. It was grueling work. It had sure been easier ten years ago, he reflected.

There was a ghostly shriek behind him and to his left; absently, he swung the shovel at the ghost, dissipating it. He chuckled a little as he stooped for the box of salt and shook it out over the grave. If Dean were here, he’d reminisce with him about the time he’d bought a plastic-handled shovel, and the blade had turned out to be some kind of crappy aluminum; no iron in it at all. Man, Dean was pissed the first time he’d swung that thing at a ghost! The dead schoolteacher had _laughed_ at him. These days everyone, alive, dead, human or not, knew you didn’t laugh at Dean Winchester. 

Or if you were Dean Winchester.

Where was Dean? Sam wondered idly as he poured the gasoline. He felt a chill and constriction at his throat; the ghost had come back. Vaguely Sam swiped its hands with the gas can; plenty of iron in that. He made a half-hearted reach for the shovel, but no need. His throat was free now; he struck a match and dropped it in.

How had this case started? He couldn’t remember. He smiled bitterly as ghostly wails and wind buffeted him; it came to him that he thought of his job much as someone who worked in a mailroom might. Every day was just another bag of mail and maybe some water cooler gossip. Or in his case, another monster and some angel or demon gossip. Get up, drink coffee, drive to work, salt, burn, repeat. Throw some apocalypse aversion into the mix on an off day, add a visit to the coroner… oh yeah! The coroner. That’s where Dean was. Probably.

Raising his hand after dropping the match, he noticed some blood on his wrist, and black bruising on the back of his hand. When had that happened? Now that was something mailroom guys probably never thought. It seemed utterly normal to him, mundane and expected, the pattern of tearing like a familiar return address on the envelope of his flesh. The thought that was strangest to Sam was probably the only thought his imaginary mailroom buddies would find normal: that he could think in terms of ten years. From college punk to thirty-something who admitted his back hurt, and that he wasn’t sure how much longer he could do this work. His twenties, the whole life he’d planned, sucked down a hole, just gone. _Yep,_ said the mailroom guys. _Get used to it._

Where had Stanford gone? he wondered as he shoveled dirt back onto the ashes of… whoever that had been. He knew it was still there, in Palo Alto, until an earthquake should swallow it. He and Dean never went near there. His last memory of it was _we’ve got work to do;_ even Jessica burning, the reason for all his toil, was so much smoke curled inside him. Gone. He could no longer remember where Stanford was supposed to take him. He remembered nothing but smoke and the earthquake yet to come.

A decade ago, he was doing… this. A decade from now he would probably be doing the same, if the world survived so long. It was only the world’s mortality he feared for. It seemed impossible every day that something so hideously dysfunctional, so wrong in all the paths that lead into and out of it, could survive. 

He knew Dean would say “What makes you think _we’ll_ live that long?” Dean fully expected to die (really, for good) every day, brushed his teeth with that belief in the morning and drank a fifth of it every night. Sam didn’t. He could feel that his death was far, far away. It might never come. There was no escape that way.

Abruptly, Sam realized that this was probably the saddest he had ever been in his entire life.

_Really?_ he asked himself. _What about when Jessica died? Or Dad, or Jo and Ellen, or Pamela or Bobby or Charlie or…_

The list was too long, he realized suddenly. It didn’t mean anything anymore. Or it meant everything. All of those deaths swirled inside him. Maybe that’s where all the deaths went when Dean “killed” Death—into Sam. Except he thought Dean carried plenty of them himself. Plenty of deaths, including dozens of his own.

_You’ve died a time or two yourself,_ he thought. He did this sometimes: pretended to be someone else, talking to Sam Winchester. It was both like being utterly alone and like being on a stage, or on film. He often felt like the world was a camera in a silent room, looking into him and recording what its vicious lens revealed. He wanted to show the footage to Dean, watch it with him with a bowl of popcorn from a cozy home somewhere, where they had jobs that paid money instead of bruises and blood, where they thought in terms of names and faces instead of deaths and failures and brief, brutal triumphs. He felt that place out there. He felt it, and he realized it had died inside him. 

It went where all the death went.


End file.
